Anti-abortion rights demonstration draws thousands to SF (VIDEO)

Spent some time Saturday at West Coast Walk for Life, now in its sixth year as an annual anti-abortion rights demonstration in San Francisco. Organizers claim this was their largest demo yet, with 35,000 demonstrators participating, many of them traveling/busing in from churches all over California.

Crowd estimates are always hard to verify, but their march did stretch along the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building to almost Fisherman’s Wharf. (A reader just sent me a spread sheet with calculations estimating the crowd to be 22,809.)

The counter-demonstration, designed as sort of a “not in my house” defense of abortion rights here in liberal stronghold San Francisco, was pretty paltry. Nevertheless, the several dozen abortion rights demonstrators marched alongside the anti-abortion rights demonstrators along the march route.

Here’s some video from our own Shaky Hand Productions, of what their peaceful — if noisy — interaction looked like along the Embarcadero Saturday. A line of SF police officers walked between the two. As the saying goes, “This is what democracy looks like.”

[gopher videoid=”63059417001″ isbrightcove=”yes” autoplay=”no”]

And towards the end of this clip is my lame attempt to capture how long the anti-abortion march stretched along the Embarcadero. I hopped up on a bench, but still, it pays to be tall when you’re watching a march and trying to shoot video: